Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel - By Jefferson Bass Page 0,2
in various stages of disrepair.
Miranda and I stood in silence awhile, soaking up the birdsong and the golden early light. One of the frolicking squirrels began to fuss at the other for breaking some rule of their game, and Miranda smiled. She turned toward me and her smile widened. It caught me by surprise, blindsided me, like a two-by-four upside the head.
Miranda Lovelady had been my graduate assistant for four years now. We worked well as a team—in the decomp lab, as we sorted through the skeletal wreckage of some highway fatality or murder victim, our movements often seemed choreographed, our unspoken communication akin to telepathy. But lately I worried that I’d crossed some invisible line with her; that I’d let her grow too attached to me, or maybe that I’d grown too attached to her. Although she was technically still a student, Miranda wasn’t a child by any means; she was a smart, confident woman of twenty-six now—or was it twenty-seven?—and I knew the ivory tower was chock-full of professors who had taken up with protégées. But I was thirty years older than Miranda, and even if that difference might seem tolerable to her at the moment, I couldn’t imagine it would remain so forever. No, I reminded myself, I was a mentor, and maybe a bit of a friend, but nothing more. And that was best for both of us.
I reached into the back of the truck and busied myself with a pair of purple nitrile gloves, forcing my thoughts back to the experiment we were here to set up. “Jess—Dr. Carter—should be here soon,” I said. “Let’s find a good tree and start tying this fellow up.”
“Ah, Dr. Carter.” Miranda grinned at me. “I thought you seemed a little nervous. Are you intimidated, or infatuated?”
I laughed. “Probably a little of both,” I said. “She’s smart and she’s tough. Funny, too, and easy on the eyes.”
“All true,” said Miranda. “She’d sure keep you on your toes. About time you found somebody to do that, you know.”
I knew all too well. My wife of nearly 30 years, Kathleen, had died of cancer more than two years ago, and I was only now recovering from the blow. The prior autumn, I had felt the first stirrings of interest and desire. Those stirrings had been kindled, I was embarrassed to recall, when a student impulsively kissed me; fortunately and mortifyingly, the kiss had been cut short by Miranda’s appearance in the doorway of my office. Shortly after that inappropriate but memorable kiss, I’d invited a woman closer to my own age—none other than Dr. Jess Carter—to have dinner with me. Jess had accepted the invitation, though she had to cancel at the last moment, when she got summoned to a murder scene in Chattanooga. I hadn’t worked up my nerve to ask her out again, but the notion occurred to me every time our overlapping cases—her fresh homicides, my not-so-fresh ones—brought us into contact.
Miranda’s question brought me back to the task at hand. “Does it matter what kind of tree we strap this guy to?”
“Probably not, but she said the victim was tied to a pine, and we’ve got several of those, so we might as well make it realistic. Doesn’t cost any extra.” I pointed at the tree where the squirrels had been scampering. “How about that one?”
Miranda shook her head. “No, not that one,” she frowned. “That one seems too…exposed. Might be hard on the campus cops or on visiting researchers if this experiment was the first thing they saw when they walked in the gate.” She had a point there. “Besides, didn’t you say the victim was found way back in the woods?” She had a point there, too.
“That’s my understanding. Prentice Cooper State Forest. Covers some pretty rugged terrain along the Tennessee River Gorge, just downstream from Chattanooga.” I pointed farther up the hillside, to another tall pine near the upper boundary. “There you go. That look secluded enough?”
Miranda nodded. “Yeah, that seems better. Bit of a haul to get him up there. But good exercise, I guess.”
“If it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger?”
“Right,” she said. Then she stuck out her tongue at me.
In unison, we leaned into the back of the truck and each grabbed one of the straps sewn onto the sides of the black body bag. We slid it out over the tailgate until it hung about a foot off the end. “Ready?” I asked.